The room is already sweating before a note is played. Manning Bar is heaving, a constant human conveyor belt pouring in from the night, bodies stacking up against the walls like they’ve been magnetised by something just out of sight. You can feel it building, that low-grade hum that says this is not going to stay contained.
Then Electric Six hit the stage and immediately tilt the whole thing sideways. Dick Valentine steps up and casually drops that the synth player is out with Lyme disease, so tonight we’re dealing with the Electric Five. This is already unhinged before it properly starts.
Behind me the crowd detonates. I’m wedged in a photography pit that feels like it was designed for a different species, narrower than a bad decision, the kind of space that starts aggressively recommending that I start Ozempic like a pushy personal trainer, while the room moves like a single organism. It’s not nostalgia, not really. It’s something more feral. These songs, ‘Danger! High Voltage’, ‘Gay Bar’, ‘Dance Commander’, they don’t age so much as mutate, picking up new weirdness every time they’re played.
Electric Six have always been the disco-punk band at the end of the world, and tonight that feels less like a tagline and more like a survival strategy. The planet’s wobbling somewhere outside these walls, but in here it’s all neon absurdity and ecstatic nonsense, a collision of rock, funk, sleaze and satire that refuses to sit still long enough to be analysed.
Three decades deep and they’re still operating like a band that might implode at any second, which is exactly why it works. No polish, no restraint, just velocity and nerve. You don’t watch this. You get pulled into it.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, it clicks. If this is the soundtrack to everything falling apart, at least it’s got a beat you can move to.
Images Deb Pelser
